Podcasts about Memphis, Tennessee

The Memphis Grizzlies take up more of the listening here than anything else, and the way they get talked about is not a highlight reel. On Grits and Grinds, Keith Parrish works through what a proposed NBA lottery reform does to a team that traded Jaren Jackson Jr. expecting a top pick to follow: under the old rules a bad season was an asset, and under flattened odds it is "a total coin flip". The team leaks into everything nearby. Wake Up Memphis, a conservative talk show, spends its Memphis clip on Stephen A. Smith's claim that the city's crime keeps NBA players away from the Grizzlies, and on Smith accepting Mayor Young's invitation to come see for himself. Music, the thing the city is known for elsewhere, is a small part of the listening by comparison, carried almost entirely by Beale Street Caravan; the civic and historical shows are fewer than the sports ones but, clip for clip, the most specific about the place.

What Memphis is

Memphis sits in the southwest corner of Tennessee on a bluff above the Mississippi River, with Arkansas across the water and the Mississippi state line a short drive south. It is the seat of Shelby County and one of the largest cities in the state, known outside the region for music (Beale Street, blues, soul, early rock and roll), for barbecue, for FedEx, and as the city where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.

The Grizzlies, argued from the cap sheet

The Grizzlies shows divide by temperament. Grits and Grinds is the fan's version: a duo, fast-moving and a little unruly by its own sound, that stays on one topic (lottery positioning, the picks owed by the Jazz, a trade exception) until it has been turned over from every side. Its clips catch a season's awkward middle: a Memphis-era franchise record of 14 defensive rebounds against the Knicks, filed by the episode under a historic lack of rebounds, and GG Jackson's 26 points on 14 shots against Denver, taken as a sign he has "a plan now".

Grizz Beat, from Grind City Media, is the roundtable version, stacking availability, contracts and seedings before turning them into a question. Its clips have Tuomas Iisalo saying he is hamstrung because the team has no bigs at all; a Ty Jerome versus KCP comparison that becomes a contract and career-trajectory debate; and Mark Cuban and Matt Ishbia clashing over whether tanking is "losing behavior done by losers". Both title runs keep returning to Cam Boozer's Summer League and to Ja Morant, whether he plays for the Grizzlies again being the question one Grizz Beat title asks outright.

Tigers, 901 FC and the coaches' side

The University of Memphis listening is coaching talk more than results. Tigers in 20, the 247Sports Tigers show, plays a coach's corner episode in which Damon Stoudamire argues that TJ McConnell, not the first-round picks, defined Arizona's leadership, and an episode titled "Where's the Fight?" that frames Penny Hardaway's loyalty to Memphis players as the force most likely to burn his coaching ambitions down and adds four Memphis losses up to 13 points to argue that Ryan Silverfield's six-win season was closer to eight or ten.

My 3 Subs: A Soccer Odyssey belongs to Tim Van Horn, color commentator for Memphis 901 FC and the Memphis Americans, and its clips are the coaches he covers explaining themselves: Corey Adamson of the Americans on minimizing damage (concede shots, not high-percentage ones) before building an attack; Ben Pierman on 901 FC's five-game road start, 14 matches in two months and a process built on daily work. TheMitchDavisShow ranges across SEC basketball and college baseball with Memphis as one stop, a baseball preview in which Coach Matt Riser counts "18 guys coming back" and a pitching staff with "quality" rather than "quantity".

The civic table

Behind the Headlines, from WKNO and The Daily Memphian, is where the city's arguments get their numbers. Eric Barnes hosts a measured table of reporters, elected officials and policy people, and the standing questions are who has authority, what happens next and how much money is involved. Its clips are about enforcement: more than 47,000 pretextual traffic stops producing about 1,200 warrant-based arrests, in "1626: How clear is the line between immigration stops and MPD policy?"; State Rep. Pearson saying he would not have voted to end the shutdown because ACA premiums could rise 253%; Memphis lawmakers describing ICE as creating "a culture of fear" while welcoming the highway patrol surge for violent crime and warrants. The titles go where the clips do not: county primaries, affordable housing, the Memphis-Shelby County school board and state lawmakers pushing for an MSCS takeover.

Wake Up Memphis is the other register, a solo monologue that moves by assertion and repetition with one foot in the city and the other in national fights; the Stephen A. Smith episode also carries Andy Ogles calling for Trump to replace Jerome Powell and Elon Musk on Neuralink implants, which is a fair picture of how fast it pivots. Rescue 901 is the Memphis Police Association and Memphis Fire Fighters Association's own show, the profession talking to itself: a guest who does threat assessments saying he would rather spend an hour on a behavior assessment than a month investigating a mass shooting after the fact; Mercedes Rodriguez's three days in intensive care because stopping the Narcan drip set off another overdose phase; Mike Williams declaring "I am unbought. I am unbossed" before demanding honest public-safety conversations.

Institutions, memory and the music

The Sidebar with Eric Barnes is the same host in a different chair, on the city's institutions, from Ballet Memphis to the Memphis Youth Symphony Program to Annesdale Mansion and its ghosts. Its clips have Brian McLaughlin, CEO of the YMCA of Memphis and the Mid-South, describing a COVID meal operation that grew from 2,000 meals a day to 40,000, and 250 meal sites that double as a way to spot homework, mental-health and family-support needs; and Yvette Roberts, who studied painting at Memphis College of Art before becoming an internationally recognized rock photographer.

Our Memphis History is the archive: street names, "Boss" Crump, Sears Crosstown, the Chinese in Memphis, the rebuilt city of 1880-1886. Its clips are the strongest on the page: Ida B. Wells, orphaned at 16 and teaching to support her siblings, leaving for the eastern seaboard after the Memphis lynching and crying through a speech in New York that the organizers call the best they have ever heard and that goes out in 10,000 printed copies; and Dean William Dimmock's 1968 sermon at St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, turning grief at Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination into a call for hope.

Beale Street Caravan is built on live performance, and its clips are the conversations around it: Elizabeth King on returning to recording after raising 15 children and walking into the studio without rehearsal; Mike Doughty on Patreon songs paying his mortgage more reliably than Soul Coughing's reunion touring; and, from the vault, Rufus Thomas reducing career advice to "mind your own business".

Where to start

• For the Grizzlies argued properly: Grits and Grinds and its lottery-reform clip, then Grizz Beat for the roundtable version of the same season.
• For the city's politics with the figures attached: Behind the Headlines and the immigration-stops episode.
• For Memphis history told as story: Our Memphis History and the Ida B. Wells episode.
• For the music: Beale Street Caravan and Elizabeth King.

The Memphis feed on this page plays clips from these shows.